Our Eternal Spark
by lotuskasumi
Summary: From an anonymous prompt on Tumblr: "a whouffaldi fic based on your theory that touching clara hurts the doctor." (Whouffle/Twelve x Clara)


_All the love and all the hatred_  
_Lovers searching for the seed_  
_That piece of existential knowing_  
_That gives tomorrow wings to dream_  
_All the broken-hearted angels_  
_Living in the ether seams_  
_All the love and all the hatred_  
_Tell me dearest - who are we?_

— The Cruxshadows, "Love & Hatred"

* * *

_"Please don't change."_

A blinding light like a flash of insight, no faster than a blink but as endless as the one that carries all into the same rest, and then —

Eyes, eyes. What did he know about eyes? Quite a lot, and yet so very little. How different things look when you've got a new pair in. How different others look, looking back at you. How strange and new everything about you becomes, not just the eyes but the face and the voice and the every last utter detail that makes you into who you are, when there's a familiar face looking at you in an unfamiliar way.

He looked at the smaller version of himself reflected in her eyes, and she looked at herself in his — saw through that, for a second, to whatever it was he had become.

Had he been another man, he might have asked, "How do I look?" Made some comment about rudeness and staring, a playful little correction he hadn't thought to make earlier, when she'd gone so far as to stare and _point_. But he wasn't another man. He was himself.

He just didn't know who that was yet.

One look at her eyes let the Doctor know Clara didn't, either.

—

The physical world had settled around them, but they themselves were still rattled, shaking. He was as used to the change as he would ever be, and so stood with a poise that was not grace, just heaviness, the sort of solid, sturdy stance that comes from a long life anchored deep with experience.

And yet it was all still so new, so odd, so different. And yet it was exactly the same as it always was before.

Always, endlessly, everlasting. How horrible.

—

He expected the collapse, the strength in his legs to give out and to drag down the rest of him in an awkward, rather-more-gangly-than-last-time heap, and he had a suspicion that she might reach out for him, not because she particularly felt anything for him, but because it's what one does when someone falls. You try to catch them. And, in failing that, you reach out to them to lend some meager bit of support, the kind that can only come from clasped, shared hands.

Clara, being Clara, did exactly that. And the Doctor, being the Doctor, with some vestigial shred of the him that was alive inside the him that is and would be for (perhaps) some time now, held her hand in a grasp as tightly as he could make it before oblivion came.

He didn't expect it to hurt as much as it did, like a fire alive between their fingers and palms and the shifting bones, coiling blue veins. He didn't expect it to burn, the way a regeneration always seemed to burn — a pain unbearable, but not unimaginable. And if it could be imagined, it could be, in some small way, endured.

This couldn't.

—

"You're… you're different. You've changed." She bit into her lip after saying that, folding her fingers around each other in nervous little twists and scrapes. She might have laughed, looked like she wanted to laugh, but something stopped her.

"That tends to happen, yes," he said, with a new voice and a new accent and a new tone, but the same sadness. He wondered if she could still see it.

Clara's mouth twitched as she waved a hand up to down, gesturing at him. "Meant the clothes," she said.

"That also happens."

This time she did show something like a smile. He wondered why he couldn't return it. After a quick second of reflection, but a long enough stretch of time to make Clara's face fall again, he knew the reason.

Because it was enough to see her smile.

How long had he spent looking at her and not really seeing — seeing only the shades and shadows of the woman he thought she was, the woman behind the mystery? But there was no mystery, no ghost, no thing in the dark to chase after at all — just Clara. Just her. With the sad smile and the sadder eyes and the hand held out then — and now, see, look, she's doing it again, reaching out for him still — with a plea on her lips.

Only this time she doesn't say it.

The Doctor remembers the pain only after he takes her hand again, and the fire is back and biting, burning, making every fiber a cinder that falls into horrid clumps between them. But there are some things that breathe in ash, some things that are born from flame.

He was. He still is. Each touch is a regeneration beyond flesh; a revolution of the spirit, the eternal spark from which the rest burns forth.

And Clara kindles it.

—

So when he kisses her, he does so quickly, dismissively, as if it wasn't long-planned and pored over with the fervor of a battle's last stratagem, he has some idea that there will be fires and ash and all the pain in between. But he has no idea how sweet that kind of death can be, because it is no death at all, but a life, a pure, thrilling, horrible gasp at _living_.

And it hurts, of course it does. It hurts more than he'd like to say.

Clara knows this, the way she knows him still, without words or without even a glance; it's the very air that shifts and pivots to accompany their changes of thought, alerting the other to sorrows and dangers, but not just bitterness but happiness, too. She knows that it hurts and she makes each touch and responding kiss as feather light as she can.

But it's not the intensity of the caresses that hurt, but the passion that gives them life. And he doesn't know how to tell her this, because he doesn't think he has to — she knows. Surely she must.

He sees it in her eyes.

—

"Did you write this?" Clara asks, gesturing to the chalkboard with one hand, a cup of tea held in the other.

The Doctor glances up briefly from his book, one hand holding it open on his lap, the other held against his temple to ease the throb there. He moves his eyes to where hers are and, for an instant, he wants to laugh. But instead he just pulls a little smile that fades with the words he says next. "Don't know what came over me. Feel free to give it a grade."

"_Our Eternal Spark_," she started to read, putting on her most impressive orator's voice. And the Doctor listened as Clara's voice faded into silence when she read the next line, and the next, then the last.

He kept his eyes on the book, not on her, but every other part of his attention was rooted there, the way a magnet snaps to its mate, the way a compass leg tilts and bends and rights itself again when the other comes home. He keeps this up even when she's stepped 'round the front of the arm chair to face him, tea cup abandoned — where did she put it? — her arms folded over her chest, closing her shawl around herself. She's waiting for his eyes and he's waiting to see what she'll do next, because that interests him far more than what he has to say.

Clara puts her hand over his, and the pain moves from just the edges of his fingers up to the ridge of every knuckle. When she reaches out with the other hand to caress his face, he feels the flames outrun the pain in his temple, a headache he's prone to now.

And when she kisses him he can taste ash and soot and all the lives that he could have been, but he can taste potential and joy and love in there, too. And that's as much a part of him as it is a gift from her.


End file.
